Sign in

SimCity’s Evil Twin

The Museum of Modern Art’s inclusion of fourteen video games in their new “Applied Design” exhibition is a worthy, forward-thinking gesture, but as an exhibit it doesn’t quite work. To make any sense at all, games need to be not just played but played seriously, with a sweaty, childish abandon totally unlike the cool passivity of an art viewer. Tucked into a corner of MOMA’s sleek architecture and design gallery, the games seem bedraggled, and (during my visit at least, and with the crucial exception of a few children) were played only tentatively. Some of them—hardy classics like Pac-Man and Tetris, and the minimalist Canabalt, which uses just a single button—remain vibrant even in these inhospitable surroundings. Others less so: the French science-fiction side-scroller Another World (originally known in the U.S. as Out of This World) is one of the most elegant games ever made, but played here it seems drab.

And some games weren’t allowed in at all. These games—most notably the immensely popular SimCity, as well as its lunatic homemade successor Dwarf Fortress—were deemed “too complex or too time consuming,” and are represented only by noninteractive video displays. This is about as satisfying as looking at pictures of food, but it is also in a perverse sort of way a real tribute: these games are still too big, too stubbornly new and strange and mysterious, to fit into a museum just yet. They can’t be sampled; you must surrender to them.

Designed by Will Wright, who had made only a single previous game, and first released in 1989, SimCity casts the player as a slightly supernatural city planner, laying out roads and power plants and building zones in a simple, brightly colored interface with a distinct resemblance to MS Paint. You choose tax rates and ordinances from a series of menus, and try to balance traffic and property values and pollution and dozens of other factors on the way to creating a successful city—with the definition of “successful” rather up in the air. It has no “end,” no plot, no set goal: you play until you are bored, or until your city seems to you to be perfect or maimed beyond repair. Along with its increasingly pretty and complex sequels (the 1994 SimCity 2000 is the one chosen for “Applied Design,” and a new version of the game has just been released), it sold over eighteen million copies, and was, as John Seabrook wrote in his 2006 New Yorker Profile of Wright, “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.”

SimCity also demonstrated a new way to conceive of video games. Most games provide players a linear narrative, and a series of what are essentially tests—of reflexes, logic, resource management, or brute perseverance—that the player must pass in order to proceed along the game’s narrative. What Wright offered was a set of tools, and a world in which to use them. Instead of tests and rewards, it gives us something deeper and more meaningful: options, and consequences.

The course of a game of SimCity is a vast, proliferating expanse of decisions and results. How many hospitals does a residential area need? Why is no one moving into the new development? Is a coal power plant worth the pollution? What if there were more parks to balance it out? (And is that really how pollution works?) What will calm these rioters—more police, or lower taxes?

The successful player of the game of consequences is not an action hero, bursting through obstacles and defeating enemies, but a heroic manager, the kind of hero David Foster Wallace found (or really, that Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” avatar Hal Incandenza found) in Captain Frank Furillo of the TV show “Hill Street Blues”: “a hero of re-action…. He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating cluttered fields…. A ‘post’-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration.” SimCity, candy-colored and user-friendly, beloved by children and installed in elementary schools, was in this way actually one of the least fantastical video games ever made. It turns out that many eight-year-olds would choose Robert Moses over James Bond sometimes.

The great lesson of SimCity, the fact the game was built to display, is the delight of city life, of urbanity in general. Even failing cities are beautiful in SimCity. Their streets are straight and well kempt, their deserted building zones are clean and peaceful and full of possibility. The colors are bright but not garish: the water blue, the land a flat green, the roads a soothing gray. The view the player has of them is from exactly the right height: close enough to see the bustle of the cars and trucks, the charmingly repetitive irregularity of the buildings, but too distant to see crime, pollution, frustration, or failure as anything more than slightly disheartening abstractions. It looks a bit like an animated tourist map, complete with color-coding, oversized landmarks, and a peculiarly American inattention to parking. The public mood can plummet, but there is never any depiction of the human suffering endemic to even successful urban areas. Pollution is tracked, but it has no long-term consequences.

Even when you are starting the settlement of the area entirely from scratch, what you are founding is always, and can only really be, a city, even when it has the population of a village. The vast fields and relative isolation and independence of rural life are essentially impossible to create in any sustainable way, and there is never any sense of a natural world displaced by the arrival of the metropolis. And though something reminiscent of suburbia can arise, it is an oddly antiquated, citified version of it, without the isolated residential enclaves and diffuse, distant commercial centers that often characterize it these days. It’s a vision of the city as existing somehow independent of its inhabitants: a city of buildings, not people; a city serenely, joyously inhuman.

More fundamental than this, though, is the very particular worldview that animates all the SimCity games. The world Wright gives his players is one defined by a constant flickering interplay between progress and equilibrium, a gentle utopia of possibility. Decay is never a real threat. His cities never die, and if left to their own devices they pretty much go on as they were. The closest thing to failure is a genial sort of rut, an inability to make the city grow and progress the way you’d like; excepting perhaps the aftermath of a nuclear power plant melting down, there’s never an irreversible collapse. Without extreme, juvenile levels of incompetence, you can’t fail to make or maintain a city, you merely fail to make that city great. It’s a commonplace that many urban planners found their vocation in childhood games of SimCity—and this at least rings true, for the game is nothing if not inspirational. Its world is infinitely soothing, its consistent message one of safety, surmountable challenge, hope, and stability.

The appeal of such fictional peace does have its limits, as it turns out. One can begin to suspect that all thriving cities look pretty much the same, that even the most successful equilibrium is simply boring. The popularity of “disasters”—the calamities, ranging from fires and airplane crashes to, in the more baroque later versions, locust swarms and U.F.O. attacks, that the player can purposely inflict on his city, or allow to occur randomly—bespeaks this creeping boredom. But it points as well to a desire to demonstrate the strength and elasticity of the world’s stability. These disasters are designed to be manageable. There is a never an unfixable problem, never a ruin that can’t be cleared and rebuilt. It is an almost comically American vision, a pure product of the Reagan dream: zero history, infinite future.

The best answer to SimCity, and its only challenger as the most interesting simulation game, is just across the way from it at the MOMA exhibition: Dwarf Fortress. It is not so much SimCity’s monstrous offspring as its gifted, maniacal, extremely worrisome younger brother. Officially titled Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, this bizarre, brilliant game by a Texan named Tarn Adams (working almost entirely on his own) has been a public work-in-progress since 2006, in which time it has, according to a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile of its creator, been downloaded about a million times. If SimCity is the video game as toy—inviting, open-ended, and subtly but unmistakably limited—Dwarf Fortress is the video game as folk art masterpiece: eccentric, over-the-top, and oddly affecting.

Dwarf Fortress puts the player in charge of a fledgling Dwarven colony, initially comprising seven dwarfs—a number that can, with the births and immigration that come with successful play, rise into the hundreds, but just as easily plunge to one or zero. You watch from above, pausing the action at will to give orders using a byzantine array of menus, but never directly controlling any of the dwarfs. The central principle of the game is an attention to detail that is frankly obsessive. Dozens of plants and animals are simulated, and hundreds of types of ore are modeled in the soil. Every dwarf has individual character traits, religious beliefs, affections, moods, and skills, and every limb and tissue layer of their bodies is modeled and tracked. (For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room—baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

Your dwarves can marry and reproduce; suffer from P.T.S.D.; bond with pets; or be taken by “fey moods” and lock themselves away to create artworks. They need constant alcohol intake to remain happy, and if they stay underground for too long will become allergic to sunlight (leading to the classic F.A.Q. entry, “Why is my fortress surrounded by vomit?”). Just starting up a new game requires a few minutes for the computer to randomly generate miles of terrain and thousands of years of local history. And this is it in its embryonic, alpha incarnation. Adams keeps an elaborate public to-do list for the game, whose entries vary in scale from the minute (“Wheelbarrows to haul more objects than can be carried”) to the truly grand (“Have religions in the game correspond to forces or deities and let you play one”), and estimates that version 1.0 won’t be finished for another twenty years.

As in SimCity, there is no real way to win the game. Instead of a series of comfortable equilibria, however, a game of Dwarf Fortress tends harshly, inevitably, toward ruin. The colony is overrun by invaders, or succumbs to disease, starvation, blood-feuds, or madness; a dragon takes up residence in the dining-hall, slaughtering every dwarf but one, who waits out the winter sealed in his room; a vast lava trap, constructed to deal with these threats, malfunctions, killing everybody; and so on. It is played alone, but its brutality, complexity, and unpredictability give its players a need for community—an urge to bear witness, to commiserate, to trade tips for using kittens as poison-detectors. Elaborate written accounts of Dwarf Fortress games, sometimes incorporating art or even animation, have become popular Internet reading material, perhaps more popular than playing the game itself.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fittingly, Dwarf Fortress has the most primitive and off-putting graphics and user interface of any game in at least the past twenty years. Much of its world is represented by nothing more than colored letters and punctuation marks: a capital “E” for a massive elephant, a green comma for some grass. Some menus are navigated with the arrow keys, others, unpredictably, with “+” and “-.” Fans have created a variety of replacement graphics sets and interface add-ons, but they are patchy, limited improvements.

Even with these constraints, there have been some considerable Dwarf Fortress feats achieved over the years, a few surprising even its designer. One player managed to construct a working, fully programmable eight-bit computer within the game, using a vast underground array of gears, levers, pressure plates, and water pumps—leading to the obvious question of whether that computer could run Dwarf Fortress.

The profound and cynical depths of the game can be better seen in a more traditional achievement, however. A massive colony named FlareChannel, created by a player called QuantumSawdust (and enshrined in the Hall of Legends section of the online Dwarf Fortress forum), provides such a view. It is an enormous fortress containing a vast housing column, a gigantic magma-driven power plant, a glass-domed throne room, and a temple featuring, in QuantumSawdust’s words, a “Sun Diagram mosaic… made out of marble, gold, obsidian, and trifle pewter.” His longest description, though, is saved for the fortress’s prison, with its “copper bridges, lava moat, water reservoir inside, and separate levels for different degrees of war criminals. The top houses the traitorous garbage dwarf who became a local leader of the goblin enemies, as well as the dragon he will soon be facing now that the Colosseum is complete.”

But more than just the fact of these goofy, sadistic buildings (and they are all the more impressive once you’ve actually played the game, and spent hours trying to dig a decent hole and keep your one donkey from wandering away), two aspects of FlareChannel cut to the heart of the strange concoction that is this game. The first is that, for all his success in the game—and FlareChannel is about as successful as any Dwarf Fortress creation yet seen—QuantumSawdust does still not feel it is secure. He writes in the Dwarf Fortress forum that the vast families his dwarves have created make him “see the danger of tantrum spirals”—a well-known phenomenon in which an injury to one member of a family causes the rest of that family to run amok with grief and anger, potentially injuring members of other families, and so on—and that “I just have to hope my amenities for the dwarves make up for any disasters that occur.”

The second is that the game is so intricate that many of the events it creates were intended by neither the player nor the designer. In one of the online accounts of FlareChannel’s history, the fort’s creator relates his “favorite story,” which he calls “The Fable of Catten and Eagle.” He tells of a single semi-tame giant eagle—one of many that fill the fort—who took an intense, inexplicable liking to Catten, a particularly competent dwarf, but also one entirely indifferent to the eagle. Twelve game-years later, Catten was caught outside during a dragon attack. The eagle rushed to his aid, blinding the dragon and then helping him kill it. They became friends, eventually died of old age, and “during the finishing of the Temple to Armok, Catten’s clothes were mysteriously found on the roof, where no path could possibly have led.” The writer theorizes that “on a rare night when others were asleep, Catten would climb aboard his old friend, strip naked, and fly around the towers.” Though some part of all this was no doubt embellished in the telling, this account is still, crucially, more a report than a story; its origins are behaviors generated by the game, and observed and interpreted by the player.

Dwarf Fortress’s cackling, clear-eyed brutality is both an implicit critique of the staid cheeriness of SimCity, and a powerful demonstration of the depth of Will Wright’s achievement. Only a masterpiece could be twisted this far. It’s a credit to the taste of the MOMA curators that both are included in the inaugural exhibition of games—but you should really just stay home, and play them.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he is an assistant editor, and n+1, and he makes comics with the artist Michael Rae-Grant.